semi/signal

I made a little plugin for Netbeans to allow copying text from the editor as RTF; mainly, preserving the foreground colors from its syntax highlighting. I wanted something akin to what’s possible with Visual Studio.

Download plugin

Source at bitbucket

Taking the copied RTF text and running it thru Rtf2Html, I can then post nicely colored code:

The NBSpecialCopyPaste by Casper Bang was incredibly helpful as a starting point for this plugin.

There’s an issue I wasn’t able to resolve before releasing this; fields (by default, highlighted green by the editor) aren’t copied properly in some cases. The API seems to give no indication that these tokens are colored differently. I know this is true for Java and PHP code, but not true for XML. The code to get the necessary AttributeSet is exactly what’s in NBSpecialCopyPaste:

I’ll dig deeper and try to resolve this in a future version.

Snapped someone’s HTML graffiti on this pole at the 7th Avenue subway in Park Slope:

I missed webOS Developer Day, but I took a look at the presentation of the Enyo framework (video below). I like most of the bullet points: faster performance, hardware acceleration built-in, etc. However, one point that’s troubling me is the idea of using higher-level controls instead of divs. From the bit of code presented in the final demo, it looks like layout (and pretty much all UI stuff) will be done using JavaScript widgets, which are translated at some point into the appropriate HTML constructs. Obviously, widget-centered development isn’t a new concept (MFC, WinForms, Cocoa… sproutcore and such on the web) nor is it necessarily a bad one (getting something presentable up and running is easier), but there always seems to be a very real and very large loss of flexibility.

When a widget doesn’t look or function exactly how you need it to, and it becomes necessary to make a new one, development within the widget framework can range in difficulty from trivial to near-impossible. As I mentioned when I wrote about Adobe Air, HTML/CSS isn’t perfect, but it’s the most flexible layout and styling framework I’ve come across. Abstracting away that flexibility in favor of plug-and-play widgets makes me cringe… it’s a nice idea, it’s a very (object-oriented) developer-ish idea, but it usually comes with a pretty high cost.

From working with both HTML/CSS and WinForms extensively, I’d say the widget-centered framework model used for desktop apps shouldn’t be replicated for web development. In fact, it should be the other way around: the flexibility of a HTML/CSS-esque system should be brought to the desktop.

How this will play out for Enyo, I don’t know. I’m cautiously optimistic. Being a web framework, everything still boils down to HTML and CSS, but it remains to be seen what level of manipulation will be allowed or make sense (in terms of performance, coding difficultly, etc.) at that level.

I made a little app to get my feet wet with Adobe Air. progTools just packages together a few common functions I find myself using frequently. You can get it my clicking the install badge (one of the very cool aspects of Adobe Air) below.

(h/t to Peter Elst for the AIR Badge WordPress plugin)

What’s offered:

• Conversion to/from a Unix timestamp
• MD5 hash on a string
• MD5 hash on a file
• SHA1 hash on a string

Not too impressive, and only the MD5 file hash really utilizes a desktop feature of the Air framework, but it is somewhat useful and, at least in my case, I won’t end up going to Paj’s Home to use the javascript md5 implementation demo quite as often. Note, Paj’s MD5 library was used and I slightly modified core_md5() for the file hash to deal with hashing successive blocks. I’ll post the code soon.

I initially dismissed Air, back when it was Apollo, as I didn’t see the value in having yet another proprietary framework which didn’t really offer much beyond what was capable within a browser, aside from local file access. A few additions to the framework and a few realizations on my part have shifted my views:

• Air supports HTML/CSS for layout and styling. Looking into cross-platform GUI frameworks, I’ve played around with WinForms (cross platform with Mono), Qt, Gtk, and wxWidgets. I’ve been disappointed to various degrees with all of them. It hit me that the most flexible and powerful cross-platform layout and styling framework out there is the HTML/CSS combo. It’s not perfect (e.g. floats, vertical centering) but it’s pretty damn good.
• Support in Air 2 for sockets and interaction with native applications. This vastly opens the field for the types of applications possible with Air.
• Market support from Adobe. The Air Marketplace is perhaps not too impressive, but it’s a major step in the right direction for desktop apps. Both Microsoft and Apple have their own stores planned, but with the success of such catalogs on smartphones for years now, why did it take so long to figure it out?
• Install badges. They’re cool and important as they provide a bridge between the web and the desktop. Odd, but it seems Adobe more-so than Microsoft or Apple seems to understand the web-desktop relationship. Again, why is Adobe, a company that was fairly divorced from the desktop application space, the first to figure out that this was something important or at least the first to actually build it.

Now it’s not all sunshine and roses. Making an HTML/AJAX app in Air brings up a problem every AJAX developer has likely faced at some point. Javascript is slow… very slow. JavaScriptCore/Nitro, V8, Chakra, Tracemonkey… it doesn’t really matter (though performance improvements are being made), once your volume of data grows you’ll cringe at how slow things become. Coming from C++, C#, or even PHP, it’s painful to witness. In progTools a file only a few megabytes large will noticeably stall the application (I didn’t do the call asynchronously, but that’s besides the point). ActionScript is perhaps better and interop to a native executable could also alleviate the issue, but ultimately I’d simply like a faster JavaScript engine.

A second issue, relevant but not specific to Adobe Air, is code signing; you’ll notice the scary warning when installing progTools. Code signing is bullshit. Expensive bullshit. Yet, every platform developer is requiring it due to some misguided attempt at security. If you want to install progTools, the chain of trust is between me » this web server » you. Sticking a certificate authority in this chain is nonsense – a typical user will not know the CA and cannot establish any level of trust with some random, corporate CA.

Coding signing simply punishes small developers and establishes a new industry to leech from our wallets. In addition, as this user on StackOverflow asserts, it may well hamper the success of Air:

When you visit a site that lets you download an AIR app, it pops up big red screaming warnings about the imminent trashing of your computer, the theft of your identity and a life of torment[1]. Unless, of course, all the bedroom programmers decide to cough up the ongoing cost of certification.

User encouragement FAIL. Hobby developer encouragement FAIL. Technophobe terrorficiation avoidance FAIL.

I love AIR, but I don’t know what they were thinking with the installer. Laywers’ office moved closer to the developers’ over at HQ or something?

Anyways, I’m done ranting. I’ll eventually suck it up and get a certificate as I’m powerless to do anything else.

As for Air, I’ve just scratched the surface, but I’m impressed.

oh, and if you’d like to see something added to progTools, just let me know.

Cool snippet I found here, which was helpful in building Ekkio’s login forms.

Notice that the password field is really a text field when the page loads – it does not mask characters. However, once the the field has focus and the user beings typing his password, masking is expected, so the field is transformed into a password field. This is trickier than it sounds because you can’t change the type attribute of an input element.

A possible solution is to clone the input element, then change the type attribute of the clone.

You clone the field, change the type attribute of the clone, then delete the original. Unfortuantely, this doesn’t work in IE, as even changing the type attribute of a clone is not allowed. The only solution I’ve found so far is to clone manually by actually writing the HTML markup with the new type:

This works but it’s not as versatile. The revised code is shown below.